I've got a Lexmark Z705 printer -- nice (Windows, USB) printer, by the way -- and I've got horizontal streaks across the page.

The Lexmark drivers come with a cartridge cleaning utility; by using it I can see that one or two of the blue nozzles and one or two of the magenta nozzles are blocked. The yellow nozzles are basically all bunged up.

Running the cleaning utility improved matters a bit, but it's still not perfect. Is there anything, other than buying a new cartridge, that I can do to clean up my printout?

Aside: I'm just filling in my Tax Return, and needed to print an extra employment page (downloaded from the Inland Revenue website) -- the grey background of the form has come out kinda lilac-/mauve-coloured.

Ordinarily I could live with it, but it's a good photo-quality printer, and I don't want streaks in my photos when I come to print them.

What I did for my HP cartridges when they get blocked, is to get a mug of water, and put it in the microwave for 60 seconds. Then drop the cartridge into it and leave it for 15mins. After than dry out the cartridge (like leave it for an hour) and try again.

Worked on my cartridge were I only got magenta out before. Afterwards it was perfect.

My dad used a toothbrush once, it worked.

On my epson printer I have to run the cleaning utility about 6 times before it totally cleans it up.

A little isopropyl alcohol and a paper towel or cotton swab seems to work pretty well for Epson and HP cartridges. I assume Lexmark's aren't all that different. Just soak part of the paper towel in the alcohol and rub away the dried out ink from the end of the cartridge.

-Mike

Well, I managed to unblock the yellow nozzles by repeatedly running the cartridge clean routine.

Unfortunately, in the process, I managed to use up all of the black ink. So I went out to get a new cartridge.

Printing the alignment page today, I find that the cyan and magenta inks are just about empty as well.

Fortunately, I have a spare colour cartridge here, so I've fitted that along with the new black cartridge.

More fortunately still, Lexmark provide a recycling envelope in the box, for sending your empties back, thus saving the environment.

So I feel miffed at having spent £45 on new cartridges, but slightly better that no fluffy rabbits needed to die for it.

What you've described is the reason I will never buy another Epson printer: You use up all the ink cartridges just trying to get the nozzles to unclog. I know yours wasn't an Epson, but I guess the Lexmarks have the same problem.

I haven't had the nozzles on my Canon clog yet, and I'm told the Hewlett-Packard ones integrate the nozzle with the ink cartridge so that it gets replaced with each ink replacement (but also making the cartridges painfully expensive).

Yeah. All the HP InkJet/DeskJet printers have the print head as part of the ink cartridge. On the DeskJet I'm currently using it has two cartridges, a black ink one and a combined colour one.

You could always just print a test page once every couple of weeks to keep it from gumming up.

New printers usually come with underfilled cartridges, though.